Cheryl Miller: Yearning to breathe free: The case for open immigration

Wednesday

Jun 23, 2010 at 12:01 AMJun 23, 2010 at 11:10 PM

Do you suppose the bewildering red tape and extortionate cost — more than doubled since 2007 — could have something to do with the escalation of illegal immigration?

Cheryl Miller, columnist

I’ve been thinking a lot about immigration lately. My friend Andy got married a couple of months ago, on the heels of the global courtship of his lovely Russian lady. The process of gaining permission to immigrate was gruelingly complicated and absurdly expensive. A man less smitten would have given up.

In order to marry, the couple was required to meet in person at least once in the previous two years, so right off the bat there was a cost of over $1,000 for airfare, passport and visitor’s visa to Russia. A flurry of documents had to receive official approval of both countries before she and her son could enter the United States. Each step along the arduous way required a substantial fee and was governed by time constraints. The process isn’t over yet — there are still permissions to seek and fees to pay before they have their green cards. They have lost track of how much it has cost so far; suffice to say it’s thousands of dollars.

Do you suppose the bewildering red tape and extortionate cost — more than doubled since 2007 — could have something to do with the escalation of illegal immigration? Would a streamlined system of open immigration eliminate the problem?

I have heard several arguments against open immigration: Our country would be too crowded if we dispensed with quotas and lottery; immigrants reduce the jobs available to natural born citizens; it would cost too much to process additional immigration paperwork; immigrants are a drain on our welfare and educational systems; immigrants could be criminals, or harbor contagious diseases. Are these arguments valid?

There is abundant privately owned land available for purchase and development, but consider also that 30 percent of the United States is “public” land — owned by everybody and nobody — and could be sold as necessary. Besides that, population is not static; the numbers are constantly shifting. (People die.)

Many immigrants are willing to work at jobs that are hard to fill because natural born citizens find them demeaning. (Just ask those involved in agriculture if they notice a difference in work ethic between immigrants and natural born citizens.) Others bring special skills to the workforce. This argument also ignores that among immigrants are brilliant innovators who will create jobs that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

The cost of immigration is stratospheric because that’s the way bureaucracy works: there is a vested interest in creating mountains of minutiae, requiring more and more bureaucrats at ever higher wages.

As for being a drain on social services and public education — that is an argument against the welfare state, not against immigration. If immigrants were ineligible, alternatives such as private schools and home schooling would materialize.

The problems of human and drug trafficking such as we have on our border with Mexico (we have in effect ceded a portion of Arizona to Mexican criminals) are in fact created by our nation’s refusal to face reality. With a policy of open immigration, smuggling of immigrants would virtually disappear. Ending the enormously costly, wasteful and ultimately futile “war on drugs” would eliminate murderous drug cartels and crimes committed by desperate drug users. Drug education and treatment are far better uses of scarce dollars.

A valid function of immigration services is ensuring that prospective immigrants don’t have contagious diseases, and that they have no criminal record or other reasons to suspect them of malicious intent.

The pre-eminent reason people immigrate to America is our relative freedom. Our nation’s charter acknowledges that each person’s life belongs to himself, not to a ruler, not to the state. Freedom allows the individual to pursue his own interests for his own sake.

At bottom, it is un-American to close our borders to any citizen of the world who seeks the light and responsibility of freedom. But for lucky happenstance of birth, it could be you or I yearning to breathe free.

Macedon resident Cheryl Miller can be e-mailed at Fortuna_reilly@yahoo.com.

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